For some background, I originally wanted to break into programming back when I was in college but drifted more into desktop tech support and now systems administration. SysAdmin work is draining me, though, and I want to pick back up programming and see if I can make a career out of it, but industry seems like it could be moving in a direction to rely on AI for coding. Everything I’ve heard has said AI is not there yet, but if it’s looking like it hits a point where it reaches an ability to fully automate coding, should I even bother? Am I going to be obsolete after a year? Five years?
Those jobs, or better, this kind of task, won’t go away. It will just become different.
Think about how completely different our modern development looks compared to, say, the 80s. Nobody writes assembly anymore, so nobody learns the basics! Nobody reads the manual anymore, instead we use autocomplete and Google. Remembering the arcane runes of C used to be exactly the kind of “hazing grunt work” you’re talking about. That skill used to be valuable, but who of us can honestly say to remember more than a handful of nontrivial method signatures?